Beautiful Mind 🌻 🌻 🌻

Hoarders: This season’s Hoarders is wild and the good news is that it’s available almost everywhere.  It stars Donald J Trump, a Queens man with lots and lots of boxes.  According to the NY Times’ Trump whisperer, Maggie Haberman, Trump has a strange attachment to boxes, especially the ones he stored all over Mar a Lago where he keeps or at least once kept highly confidential war plans and information about nuclear capabilities of various countries alongside his favorite orange make-up, news clippings and letters from pen pals like Kim Jong un. His attachment to boxes is so strong that he even travels with some of them, presumably the ones with the most valuable information. Knowing how important those boxes are to him his aides called them the “beautiful mind material,” a reference to the movie about schizophrenic mathematician John F. Nash Jr.  Texts about Trump’s obsession with his boxes and how he micromanaged their contents and where they were stored are part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s thirty-seven count “talking” indictment. Some of the cited texts were written by Molly Michael, a White House assistant who continued working with Trump after he moved back to Mar a Lago.  Michael, identified in the indictment as Trump Employee 2, told the Grand Jury that Trump packed and looked through the boxes himself, an assertion that contradicts those provided by his lawyers. She is no longer working for Trump as she, unlike indicted co-defendant/body man Walt Nauta, doesn’t like how she looks in orange and/or knows a sinking ship when she sees one. The Washington Post reports that in an effort to right that ship, not long after he joined the Trump legal team in the fall of 2022, former Florida Solicitor General/Current Trump defense counsel Christopher Kise, proposed quietly approaching Attorney General Merrick Garland to negotiate a settlement, one that would avoid prosecution in exchange for hoarder in chief Trump returning the contents of his beautiful mind boxes.  Trump nixed that suggestion, opting instead to rely on the advice of Tom Fitton, the president of very conservative/right wing activist organization Judicial Watch.  Fitton has a BA in English from George Washington University but has never gone to law school. Of course, that lack of legitimate legal credentials hasn’t stopped him from providing legal advice. Based on his faulty analysis of the Bill Clinton’s sock drawer case, Fitton advised Trump that he was entitled to everything in his boxes.  The sock drawer analogy doesn’t apply, it involves a 2012 decision where the court concluded that former President Clinton was entitled to keep his “purely private” audio tapes of interviews with a historian, tapes stored in his sock drawer, as those tapes qualified as personal records; they were his personal thoughts rather than presidential memos or things like nuclear codes and war plans. By the way, applying his astute legal analysis, Fitton also advised Trump that he could stop the counting of ballots at midnight on Election Day especially all those absentee ballots from blue districts. Maybe Fitton should start playing shrink and advise Trump to plead hoarder syndrome insanity?  On the subject of unusual legal minds, though she doesn’t have much experience, Judge Aileen Cannon has done something right.  Yesterday, she ordered Trump and Nauta’s lawyers to quickly apply for security clearances.  That’s good but it not clear that Nauta has obtained a Florida lawyer yet.      

Red Politics:  The Republicans have another presidential candidate.  Francis Suarez, Miami’s Republican Mayor, has thrown his hat into the ever-expanding ring. Suarez who is only 45 years old,  previously admitted that he didn’t vote for Trump in either 2016 or 2020 but has warmed up to him as of late because of course.  He is probably another one of those seeking to elevate his visibility in the hopes of being considered as someone else’s running mate and/or as a candidate in 2028.  The Republicans have made significant inroads with Latin American voters and having Suarez on the ticket could further grow the party’s Hispanic support so there’s a real chance that someone might seriously consider adding Suarez to their ticket.  Hopefully, if Suarez offered to pay for everyone’s lunch at a Cuban restaurant, he, unlike Trump would really cough up the dinero.  It turns out that Trump’s visit to Miami’s Little Havana hot spot Versailles Restaurant, the one that just about every media outlet covered, was nothing more than a publicity stunt. Trump only stayed for ten minutes, didn’t eat, and didn’t foot the bill for anyone who did. Unlike Suarez, Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson is not warming up to Trump and has asked the RNC to reconsider the requirement that all candidates appearing on the Republican primary debate stage sign a pledge committing to support the eventual winner of the GOP nomination.  Hutchinson wants that pledge amended to exclude felons. No surprise that the RNC won’t make that change.  Worth noting former NJ Governor Chris Christie says he’ll sign if that’s what it takes to get onto the debate stage, he figures he can renege later because he knows that Trump, to the extent he does agree to debate, would also likely renege if someone other than him gets the party’s nod. 

A Situation:  During her Wednesday daily press conference, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that there were probably “about 787 million things” that she could say about Fox News’ Tuesday night chyron that referred to Biden as a wannabee dictator, but that instead she wasn’t “going to get into it.”  Well, management at Fox did get into it. First, they responded to inquiries about the chyron by saying that they had it taken down as soon as it came to their attention, adding that they were dealing with “the situation.”  This morning it was reported they have fired Alexander McCaskill, the news producer responsible for the chyron. McCaskill, who previously worked on Tucker Carlson’s show, was a twelve-year Fox veteran.  He is one of those named in a toxic work environment lawsuit by a former colleague.  As to Tucker, he and Fox are still duking it out with Fox’s lawyers sending him a cease-and-desist letter in an attempt to get him to halt his new Twitter series.